I have a "news" folder that aggregates various news sources that have RSS feeds. I mentioned not long ago that I liked the BBC news feed and that it didn't have many duplicate posts. I don't know what happened, but that's no longer the case. It seems every story is posted to RSS at least twice. I don't know if there are minor updates or not, I've glanced over them and hadn't noticed anything different.

But I'm not going to unsubscribe.

A lot of the BBC coverage includes climate or extreme weather stories from around the world, like the 24 people killed in a highway collapse in China. Or the flooding in Brazil. Or the flooding in Kenya.

I follow a site called The Invading Sea that covers climate stories as they relate to Florida. Like this one regarding the warming waters at abyssal depths. Or this one, which aggregates a long list of stories about Floridians and climate change.

Occasionally there are some "good news" stories, like the new EPA regulations regarding coal-fired power plants.

But you know that's just going to wind up at the Supreme Court where that majority of right-wing ideologues will say the EPA doesn't have the authority to regulate power plants.

It's probably way past "too late" to avoid the "catastrophic effects" climate scientists have been warning about. Maybe we might have bought ourselves some time if we took this stuff seriously in like, 1980. But we'd still be dealing with the effects of "overshoot" in terms of population growth and development, and the concomitant degradation of the natural environment and the ecological systems that underpin all of life on this planet.

The fact that extreme wealth inequality has the world's wealthiest people actively working to undermine and weaken the institutions of government that allow us to make consensus decisions and take collective action is coincident with these twin crises only makes it even worse.

We're not going to make it.

It's just sad to watch it all unfold in RSS.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 13:38 Wednesday, 1 May 2024